The conventional paper shredder is intended to make confidential documents which are to be destroyed unreadable by tearing them into many narrow strips. For anyone determined to reconstruct the documents thus shredded to find out the information contained therein, piecing together these strips, although time-consuming, is not overly difficult because the strips fall into the waste receptacle in roughly the same sequence and proximity as they were before being torn. Thus, conventional shredders, while useful for certain purposes, are not a foolproof way of rendering documents illegible. Such conventional shredders are shown by way of example in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,960,335; 3,894,697; 3,860,180; 3,620,461; 3,217,988 and 1,996,177.
All of the aforesaid patents deal with rendering documents illegible by shredding them into narrow strips which, as related above, is insufficient to render the documents completely illegible. The purpose of this invention is to provide a machine to quadrate documents which does not cut the paper into narrow strips, but, instead, reduces the documents to small squares or rectangles that then will fall randomly into the waste receptacle and, hence, will be very difficult to reassemble for the purpose of reading the original document. The machine has the further advantage that the small pieces are much more likely to lie flat upon each other with less air space between adjacent surfaces, thus making it unnecessary to compact for disposal.